Doxological Reduction:
Catholic Theology after the Radical
Hermeneutics of Post-modernity
Introduction
Globalized societies must cope with, what the German Philosopher Jürgen
Habermas called, the “new confusion” of a multicultural and pluralist society.
1) In the first part of the following lecture, I will provide you with short
outline of this sociological background of the philosophical debates about
post-modernity and critical theory.
I will start with a question that the French philosopher Michel Foucault
considered the key to post-Enlightenment debates about Modernity:
What difference does today introduce with regard to yesterday?
2) After a very basic introduction to the difference between today and
yesterday, I will try to explore some basic features of the, in my view, most
rigorous philosophical responses to the new confusion of post-modern
societies: Namely the radical hermeneutics of Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida.
The radical hermeneutics of these philosophers builds on the
phenomenological
tradition,
and
particularly
the
so
called
phenomenological reduction of Edmund Husserl – this will lead me to the
third part of my lecture.
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3. In this part, I will provide you with an outline of my own, Catholic response
to the twofold social and philosophical challenge of post-modernity.
More precisely, I will outline how the radical hermeneutics of philosophers
like Foucault and Derrida can be overcome and radicalized by a spiritually
grounded hermeneutics that replaces Husserl’s phenomenological reduction
by a doxological reduction.
4. Finally, in the fourth part of my lecture, I will outline how this doxological
approach affects our philosophical understanding of the truth, and why it
requires us to deconstruct modern attempts to draw a clear cut demarcation
line between philosophy and theology.
Let me return now to the guiding question of the first part of my lecture:
What difference does today introduce
with regard to yesterday?
The philosophical debate about the radical hermeneutics of critical theory are
part of late modern attempts to cope with the economic and social
phenomenon of “globalisation”.
Globalisation is not as novel a phenomenon – at least not in Western societies,
in which the origin of modernity is to be located.
Rather, globalisation is to be considered as the delimitation of the experience
of modernity, which started to shape our Western world already in the 18th
century.
Accordingly, the word ‘post-modernity’ does not designate a new epoch which
comes ‘after’ modernity. It refers to the radicalisation of experiences which are
characteristic for modernity as whole.
2
For this reason I prefer to name both, post-modernity and globalisation, by the
more precise term: radical modernisation. Radical Hermeneutics is a response
to the phenomenon of radical modernisation.
Sociologists agree that the most striking feature of modern societies is
reflexivity: > In modern societies, social and cultural habits become
increasingly reflexive. What does this mean?
Let us imagine a ‘simple believer’ – say in the 18th century. He is kneeling down
to begin his prayers. Suddenly a scholar from Paris appears behind him. The
scholar takes some notes; finally, after the simple believer has finished his
prayer, he approaches him saying something like this:
‘Very interesting, what you are doing there. Do you know that the uncivilized
people in the bush of southern Brazil are performing similar rites in order to
make it raining?’
The simple believer may be irritated about this comparison, even if the scholar
expresses his respect with regard to what he is doing. Whatever he will do: His
confidence in the habit of praying will be questioned. The educated scholar does
not need to express any criticism with regard of the religious habits of rural
people. Already the mere presence of a neutral observe will provoke a shift in
his self-perception.
It is exactly this phenomenon which caused the invention of the concept of
‘culture’ in the 17th and 18th centuries by philosophers like Rousseau and
Voltaire.
The French anthropologist > Claude Levi-Strauss describes a similar experience
in his book Trist Tropiques. While investigating the native culture groups in
Brasilia, he tried to behave as reticent as possible. But already his mere presence
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as a detached observer changed the life of the native groups. It made them selfconscious, and this means (as the English world self-consciousness indicates):
they started to behave inhibited, or even embarrassed with regard to their
traditional customs and habits.
In traditional societies people tend to perceive their ethical and spiritual habits
as something ‘natural’. It seems to be self-evident that everyone has to keep to
certain rituals and traditions. By contrast, the modern concept of ‘culture’
indicates that our habits have become contingent: You may pray in this way or
in that way, depending on your ‘cultural tradition’, and if you don’t like it, you
may leave these customs to aged mothers.
This attitude undermines the sustainability of religious habits, because it makes
them appear as arbitrary and exchangeable.
However, at the beginning of the modern era this was primarily an attitude of
educated elites. > Only in ‘post-modernity’ the experience that customs, habits
and traditions are exchangeable becomes part and parcel of our everyday life.
The detached attitude of Voltaire becomes now distributed through digitalized
media and a globalised habit of unlimited mobility. If we are watching television,
if we are communicating via the internet, or if we are doing a journeys to foreign
countries: Post-modern people are used to compare themselves with other
people and other cultures. The modern habit of reflecting on habits and
traditions in the mirror of detached cultures or traditions has become an
everyday experience.
Precisely this is what sociologists call reflexive modernization. In principle
reflexivity is a characteristic feature of modernity as a whole. > The reflexive
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attitudes of public and scientific criticism undermined the authority of
traditional narratives and habits since the 17th century.
However, only in late modern societies this reflexive attitude becomes a
general feature of everyday life on a global scale. Under the impact of an
increased mobility and information exchange we have become used to consider
our own practices and traditions in the mirror of different practices and
traditions; our everyday attitudes have become reflexive.
This second step of modernisation has far-reaching cultural and political
consequences that affect also the classical modern authority of scientific
strategies of problem solving.
In classical modernity, the liquidation of the bonds of traditional narratives and
habits was equivalent with ‘scientific progress.’ This is no longer the case. Rather
we are becoming increasingly aware that the authority of scientific rationality
standards is equally entangled with tradition bound narratives.
One of the first philosophers who analysed the impact of this second step of
modernisation on scientific rationality standards was the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger. Starting from his 1927 opus magum Beeing and Time,
Heidegger argued that the modern idea of scientific progress is based on a
historically contingent Western myth: It is based on the modern fiction of an
autonomous subject that is able to achieve a perfect control over his actions and
habits. Philosophers like Michel Foucault built on this analysis.
Critical observations like these with regard of the limits of scientific reason have
occasionally provoked hasty conclusions under post-modern theologians – for
example the assumption that the modern idea of scientific progress has failed,
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and that we are now prepared to return to the narrative rationality of premodern times.
However, as I have pointed out at the beginning of my lecture, post-modernity
is not to be confused with new epoch which comes after modernity. To the
contrary, it is to be considered as a radicalisation of modern habits.
Reflexivity is no longer a specialist habit of educated elites – but it has not
vanished. The reflexive attitude of modernity has only turned against its
previous guide. (PPT old and new authorities)
The last point explains, why post-modern ‘new atheists’ are more aggressive and
less relaxed about the authority of their scientific narratives than classical
modern atheists like Marx and Freud: The classical modern convection, that
scientific theories will finally provide us with a superior solution to the problems
of everyday life, is no longer self-evident. Undaunted supporters of this
conviction are rather perceived as overly confessional.
Theologians should be aware of this change of attitude, since it affects also the
self-understanding of classical modern theology.
In classical modern times, religious people tended to justify their convictions
based on scientific rationality standards. They tried to compensate the
increasing weakening of traditional habits by taking refuge to scientific theories,
as, in the worst case, theologians like William Paley or philosophers like Richard
Swinburne did.
More sophisticated liberal theologians adopted a middle ground in that they
tried to negotiate a compromise between traditional religious convictions and
scientific rationality standards, as for example Bultmann, Pannenberg, and
Polkinghorne did. They tried to reassess the validity of Christian doctrine in the
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light of scientific rationality standards in order to make sure that they are
compatible with the modern narrative of scientific progress.
In post-modernity this classical modern strategy of saving religious
commitments becomes increasingly superfluous. The new confusion of postmodern societies rather reminds us in a famous sentence of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus:
“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems
of life have still not been touched at all.” (6.52)
In contrast to the early Wittgenstein, we should not be too confident that the
vanishing of all scientific questions is also already an answer. But this is another
question. I will come back to this point in the last part of my lecture.
The observations of the first part of my lecture might be summarized as follows:
Given that classical modernity undermined
the authority of religious traditions
under the guidance of the authority
of ‘scientific rationality’,
reflexivity turns in postmodernity
likewise against the authority of its scientific guide.
Lost without unquestionable orientation marks,
we have to cope with an overall experience of displacement – something
is missing at its place.
This leads me to the second part of my lecture: To Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida and the
Philosophical Responses to the post-modern condition:
Phenomenological Reduction and Radical Hermeneutcs
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Something is missing at its place:
From private commitments, partnerships and marriages, to religious and
political commitments, post-modern forms of life are characterised by an
increased insecurity and unpredictability.
We are lost without unquestionable orientation marks, and this means in
philosophical terms, we have no longer access to reliable criteria that enable us
to judge what might be counted as rational and ethically trustworthy, and what
might just be an irrational fancy of our time.
Michel Foucault compared this disquieting situation with the situation of an
aphasiac who struggles to sort coloured objects in accordance with stable
criteria of selection.
When the aphasiac is presented with the task to arrange differently coloured
skeins of wool in a coherent pattern, this can drive him crazy.
He or she may start to distinguish the red skeins from the blue and green
skeins;
but then he may suddenly put the lighted coloured skeins at one side, at
another the red ones, and somewhere else the skeins which are soft in
texture, and yet at another place the long ones, or those that have a tinge
of purple or are wound up into a ball.
Sooner or later she will discover that nothing fits together and dissolve
everything again (I am quoting now Foucault)
“and so the sick mind continues ad infinity, creating groups then
dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those
that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing
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different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and
more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety”.1
In the case of the aphasiac this disquieting situation is due to a lack of a stable
criterion of comparison. Without noticing it, he skips from relying on the
criterion “basic colours” to “brightness”, than to “texture”, “length” etc.
Eventually he discovers that everything has become ambiguous. He is trapped
in a situation of interpretational insecurity.
The effect of radical modernisation is comparable with this confusing situation.
Our ability to order our life requires stable criteria.
To a certain extent this was the case in both, classical modern and premodern
societies. People were able to assess their decisions and judgements in
accordance with criteria which were independent of subjective fancies.
Only the authorities which warranted these criteria changed, given that the
authority of religious clergy man (who were wearing black shirts) became
increasingly substituted by the authority of scientific clergy man (who were
wearing white shirts).
In globalized societies the criteria of self-assessment become increasingly
arbitrary and exchangeable.
We may trust today in the gospel and arrange the skeins of your life accordingly.
But tomorrow we may discover (after reading John Hick) that Jesus is only one
skein besides others. We may then start to sort the skeins of our life in
accordance with Zen-Buddhism, or become a Neo-Darwinist new Atheists after
an infatuating encounter with Richard Dawkins beautiful daughter. At the end
1
Foucault, Michel, The order of things. An archaeology of the human sciences, Routledge classics, London: Routledge
2002, xviii.
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of the day we will feel increasingly disturbed – “teetering on the brink of
anxiety”.
The catholic writer G.K. Chesterton has provided us with a still unsurpassed
outline of the political implications of this disturbing situation, already at the
beginning of the last century. I will give you a shortened but still very long
quotation of this brilliant text:
“Let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue
world. … He might toil for a long time at the transformation …. But if
he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his
own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it.
If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would
get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would
not get on at all.
If, after reading a fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red
or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to
show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early
bad manner.
The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to
the … epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in
Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution. And whatever
each man believed in he hammered at steadily, without skepticism ...
It was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative. … Ours is
only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let
beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the
same….
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The man we see every day—the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the
little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office—he is too mentally worried to
believe in freedom. …
He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild
philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day, a
Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day.
The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The
only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. ..
As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will
be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realised, or
even partly realised. The modern young man will never change his
environment; for he will always change his mind.
What the post-modern cultural theorist Paul Virilio called ‘l’inertie polaire’, was
already described by Chesterton in 1908: We are living in a “speeded up
standstill”.
However, other than in Chesterston, this speeded up standstill is not the upshot
of the detached life of educated London citizens. It has become a basic feature
of our everyday life, even in the case of the most uneducated people.
And exactly this marks the difference between modernity and post-modernity.
For this reason, it does no longer suffice to defend the venerable commitments
of our more or less orthodox fathers and mothers.
In a globalized world, we have to cope with the realization that our view is
always limited, and that we might need to revise our convictions whenever we
encounter someone who builds on a different cultural or religious tradition, or
adopts a detached viewpoint on the authorities we have put our trust in.
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The pope might today be as a saint, and tomorrow he will turn out to be
child abuser. Who knows? Every kind of commitment has become
dangerous – at least as long as you resist the temptation to become a
fundamentalist, or a suicide bomber.
In order to develop a sober, realistic response to this unprecedented confusion,
we need to investigate more carefully the week spot of philosophical responses
to this new situation – and this leads me back to the radical hermeneutics of
critical theory.
In his already mentioned ground breaking book The Order of Things, Michel
Foucault quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia”, quoted in a novel by Jorge
Luis Borges. According to Borges, this encyclopaedia included the following
classification of animals.
“animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tamed,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair
brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long
way look like flies.”
‘How on earth could anyone consider this mess as a kind of reasonable order’?
Critical theory offers to put such an unusual classification ‘on equal footing’ with
more familiar concepts of order – it does not give in the colonialist inclination to
treat it as a typical example of the ‘wild thinking’ of uncivilized or barbaric
cultures.
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Wonderment about the “stark impossibility of thinking that”2, becomes the
starting point of a simultaneously rationalist and cultural-critical hermeneutical
endeavour:
Radical hermeneutics offers us to reconstruct the hidden criteria that
make the “incomprehensible” appear logically consistent,
Promises to demonstrate that the apparent mess is not indicative of an
inherent limitation of the other, but “a limitation of our own”.3
In short, critical theory offers technical and ethical ways to render the other as
familiar, however strange it first seems, and the familiar as strange, however
rational it first appears.
To assess the significance of this radical turn, we have to recall that is part of a
historically unprecedented upheaval: the “new complexity and confusion”.
Radical hermeneutics enables us to cope with this confusion, without taking
refuge in a dogmatic or fundamentalist attitude that rejects the language games
of ‘the Other’, and undermines our ability to live in peace with our neighbour.
However, as the catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, the postmodern celebration of difference seems to exclude differences that make a real
difference.
Authentic acts of admiration and appreciation for the achievements of human
culture, art and even science are naturally accompanied by the realisation that
not every cultural achievement is of equal value.
2
3
Foucault, The Order of Things, XVII.
Foucault, The Order of Things, XVIf.
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There are differences that make a difference. For example, there is a difference
between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that makes a real difference; and there is a
difference between Darwin and Dawkins that makes even more a real
difference.
I am inclined to insist that differences like these would even valid, even if Tolstoy
or Dawkins were representative of supressed minority cultures that deserve our
respect and recognition.
For similar reasons, Taylor tried to recover our authentic sense of the “the holy
and the admirable”, without getting trapped in false alternatives (quotation).
He tried to find a middle path “between the inauthentic and
homogenizing demand for recognition of equal worth, on the one hand,
and the self-immurement within ethnocentric standards, on the other.”1
However, the situation becomes is a bit more complicated, if we look at the most
rigorous philosophical representatives of the radical hermeneutics of critical
theory.
Philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida would not have judged
all differences to be of equal significance; instead, they suspended our
inclination to judge. To suspend judgement is not the same as neutralizing or
flattening ‘value differences’.
This is the point where a kind of apophaticism comes into the play.
In our globalized world we have to cope with the phenomenon of instable
identities. Our social, cultural and even religious identities can no longer be
definitely fixed.
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I might be preaching the gospel on Trafalgar Square today, and tomorrow
I will become a new atheist. This is the reason why the majority of our
population will tend to postpone the decision about their true identity,
and avoid preaching on Trafalgar square.
However, as Foucault’s disciple Jacques Derrida has pointed out, we cannot just
post-pone the whole thing. We cannot avoid adopting again and again a position
that reveals our identity. Hence, we are trapped in a paradox: We have always
already started to speak about what we cannot speak about.
We might also express this paradox in an interrogative form: How to avoid
Speaking about my true identity?
“How to avoid Speaking” – this is the title of one of the key texts of Derrida on
this topic, and this title is deliberately ambiguous: How could we really avoid
speaking about our identity as Christians, Jews, Atheists, etc?
Our late-modern ‘global village’ encourages us to act like iconoclasts, who
destroyed images; it encourages us deny any attachment to finite images and
traditions, dogmatic propositions, or canonical narratives; but at the same time
we cannot avoid inhabiting conflicting traditions.
This paradox displays certain similarities to the paradoxical language games of
mystical or apophatic traditions. But it goes at the same time, as Derrida has
argued, beyond the premodern Tradition of apophatic Theology.
This became most evident when Derrida displayed in his latter writings
simultaneously a commitment to a plurality of irreconcilable positions.
On the one hand he challenged the Western standard claim that philosophy and
science are neutral undertakings. On the other hand he ‘oscillated’ between
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different and ultimately incompatible traditions. For example the Jewish
Tradition of His father, the Christian tradition of his Algerian compatriot Saint
Augustine, the Atheist Tradition of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and the postmodern indifference of his sons.
Derrida’s deconstruction tried to do justice to all these stances in the awareness
that this is impossible to achieve.
For this reason, it is inappropriate to read his writings as a kind of Jewish
or Christian mysticism (as Caputo does), but it would be equally
inappropriate to read them as a kind of atheism, an indifferent agnostic
multiculturalism, or a simple kind of post-modernism.
In my earlier research on post-structuralist Hermeneutic, I have demonstrated
that this sceptical attitude is rooted in a spiritual practice: The so called ‘Epoché’
of antique scepticism.
This spiritual tradition was mediated to philosophers like Foucault and Derrida
via the founder of contemporary, continental hermeneutics, Edmund Husserl.
According to Husserl every rigorous science has to start with a
‘suspension of our judgment’. Hence, it has to start with a kind of
spiritual attitude of restraint. Following the sceptical tradition of
antiquity, he called this attitude époché, or more specific
‘phenomenological reduction’.
Our late-modern inclination to post-pone decisions that reveal our true identity
displays in this sense not only a similarity to apophatic traditions. It is in a certain
sense also very scientific.
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In my perception this response to the late modern crisis of Western culture and
science is to be taken very seriously. But I have tried to overcome it in my most
recent research – and this leads me to the third part of my lecture:
The Transition from a Phenomenological to a Doxological
Reduction
As outlined at the beginning, I have replaced the ‘phenomenological reduction’
of Husserl and Derrida by a kind of ‘doxological Reduction’. This doxological
reduction builds on Nicholas of Cusa, who was one of the last representatives of
the pre-modern tradition of Christian learning. What is the difference between
a phenomenological and a doxological reduction?
In order to attain a pre-understanding of Cusa’s early modern, alternative
response to the challenge of modernization we may compare my above
introductory account of the modern experience of displacement with another
introductory scenario. It is included in Cusa’s little dialogue On the Hidden God.
As in my above example, this introductory dialogue focuses on a ‘simple
believer’:
Pagan: I see that you have most devoutly prostrated yourself and are shedding tears of love
– not hypocritical tears but heart-felt ones. Who are you, I ask? / Christian: I am a Christian.
/ Pagan: What are you worshipping? / Christian: God. / Pagan: Who is [this] God whom you
worship? / Christian: I don't know. / Pagan: How is it that you worship so seriously that of
which you have no knowledge? / Christian: It’s exactly because I am without knowledge,
that I worship him (quia ignoro adoro).4
4
Dialogus de deo abscondito h 3 (Opuscula 1) n. 1,4-12
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This introductory passage of a Cusa’s little tractate displays in the shortest
possible way what Cusa’s method of ‘doxological reduction’ means.
Similar to Edmund Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’, Cusa’s mystagogy
puts aside any mundane knowledge about what might or might not be
reasonable or trustworthy, and any attachment to the tacit knowledge of
narratives and traditions.
Similar to the basic attitude of Foucault and Derrida, his thinking is sensitive for
the unexpected and unprecedented that might change our basic assumptions
about what might be reasonable, trustworthy and true.
However, in contrast to Husserl’s essentially ‘neutral’ basic attitude (and in
contrast to Derrida’s attempts to recover a deconstructed version of this
attitude by counterbalancing the biases of the past) Cusa’s basic attitude is
biased.
In the face of the reflexive attitude of his pagan observer, he retains nothing but
apophatic acts of prayer and praise: the doxological address to an unknown God.
But this apophatic acts have an orientation: What makes us wonder and praise
is essential, beautiful and good – and this makes all the difference.
So, what is the difference between a phenomenological and a doxological
reduction?
1) Both kinds of reduction are in a certain sense apophatic or iconoclastic:
In both cases we are required to suspend our judgement about what we
consider to be true, beautiful, or good. Hence, they are open for
differences that cannot be anticipated. We have to be open for the
other, and – in theological terms – open for the inconceivability of God.
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2) However, a doxological reduction does not try to be unbiased, and this
leads me to the core of a radical doxological hermeneutics.
Following Martin Heidegger, Husserls phenomenological reduction can be
described as an opening for unlimited possibilities, including the possibility of a
inpenetrable fight (polemos, Kampf) of good and evil.
As critical followers of Heidegger, such as Derrida, have demonstrated,
this can lead to unsettling practical conclusions – as it happened to be the
case with Martin Heidegger himself, when he perceived, at least for a
short time in his life, Adolf Hitler (the writer of ‘Mein Kampf’) as a kind of
unpredicted ‘truth event’.
But can we really avoid being open for unimaginable possibilities without bias in
our post-modern world?
How can we exclude that, what we consider to be good might at a certain point
turn out to be its opposite, namely evil?
Take the profoundly nominalist example of Berthold Brecht:
“What is robbing a bank, compared with founding a bank?”
If you rob a bank, you offend against moral and legal rules. If you found a bank,
you might became empowered to define the rules – you are authorized to define
what counts as value!
This is consistent with our post-modern experience of moral and economical
rules:
We might trust in clerics that provide us with moral or economical
guidance. But tomorrow the might turn out to be just criminals, and this
principle seems to apply on a global scale: Unpredictable or contingent
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events, like the fall of the Berlin wall, might suddenly change our
expectations of what is reasonably possible and desirable, and then even
the minimalist rules of capitalist economic growth and value exchange
might suddenly appear as outrageous and immoral. What we consider
good might at a certain point turn out to be its opposite
Post-modern script writers and film directors are frequently influenced by the
pop-Philosophers Slavoj Zizek (I know that from my own experience in
collaborating with artist). In his writings, Zizek deals repeatedly with this
ambiguity of good and evil, and exemplifies it by the notorious villains of the
late modern film history, such as the ultimate cinema villain, Darth Vader, in
Star Wars.
Borne as Anankin Skywalker in a kind of miraculous virgin’s birth and
prophesized to become the saviour of the world, he fell to the dark side
of the universe and became Darth Vader (Parallaxe View).
In his book “The Monstrosity of Christ”, published together with a critical
response by John Milbank, Zizek goes a step further when he exemplifies the
ambiguity of good and evil with Christ himself: Jesus Christ was the ultimate
exception from the moral distinction between good and evil, hence he was
(quotation)
“God himself who, as the climatic coincidence of opposites, is identical
with Satan.” (265).
Post-modern narratives like these are not the upshot of random
phantasies. They are, as Zizek argues, in line with the logic of modern
accounts of the distinction between good and evil in the wake of Kant,
Hegel and Schelling – although I am inclined to demure that Zizek takes
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the logic of their way of thinking more seriously than they did by
themselves.
Be this as it may, the popularity of post-modern myths that display the ambiguity
of good and evil reflects a characteristic feature of our late-modern attitude with
regard to possibilities:
Should we, as disenchanted citizens of a global village, not be open for the
possibility that Jesus was a monster? Can we exclude this possibility,
without becoming dogmatic, sectarian or fundamentalist?
If we want to find a realistic response to this conundrum, that preserves what,
according to G.K. Chesterton, a common man would call ‘common sense’, we
need to replace the sceptical attitude that leads to this radical ambiguity of good
and evil by a doxological basic attitude.
Nicholas of Cusa growth up in a time, the Early Renaissance, that was similarly
confusing as our time is.
However, his doxological reduction built on the Augustinian tradition of the High
Middle ages, and this makes a significant difference.
According to the Augustinian tradition, our action is always guided by a natural
desire for the good - even after the fall (pace Calvin and his reformed
successors).
Heidegger’s critic Derrida would have been happy to adopt this position. But he
was not able to do so. Why?
Because he would have perceived every kind of teleology as unscientific or
dogmatic.
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If we assume that even corrupted persons are ultimately driven by a
natural desire for the good, then – so it seems - we start with a dogmatic
prejudgment.
This leads me back to the crunch question of radical hermeneutics: How can we
avoid dogmatic pre-judgements?
To begin with, we have to rethink the concept of ‘possibility’ itself:
Is evil – as Heidegger and Derrida assumed – really a possibility that is symmetric
to the possibility of the good?
Following Cusa, Augustine and Denys the Areopagite, I would argue: No, evil is
only a perverted possibility. I cannot explain that in detail here and now, but I
will provide you at least two hints:
1) In contrast to almost the whole tradition of modern philosophy, which
was heavily influenced by the ontology of the late Medieval Franciscan
Duns Scotus, we have to rethink the starting point of philosophical
considerations. We have to start not with thinking about ‘possible worlds’
(or virtual realities), but with a commitment to the real world that we
inhabit.
Martin Heidegger is a good example of the modern, Scotist approach (he
has actually written his PhD thesis on Duns Scotus and Thomas of Erfurt):
The early Heidegger was heavily indebted to Augustine, but he distorted
Augustine’s philosophy by reading him phenomenologically and not
ontologically.
In Accordance with Husserl’s phenomenological approach, his
philosophy starts with the question “How is being and time possible”.
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We might compare this approach with Augustine’s confessions:
Augustine’s Confessions do not start with considerations about possibilities
– they do not start with book IX or X (as Heidegger’s phenomenology does),
but with book one: with a recollection of how he started inhabiting the
world that made him think about possibilities before he had even starting
thinking (or talking).
This is a crucial difference: Other than in the so called via moderna of Duns
Scotus, William of Ockham, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, etc. our attempts to
interpret the world have to start not with a possible or virtual world, but
with the real world that we inhabit. That’s not a dogma. It’s just a more
realistic basic attitude.
2) The second point is even more important, if we want to avoid any kind of
dogmatism: We have to focus not on propositions or judgements about the
world, but on the performativity of spiritual practices. What does this
mean?
As indicated, the tradition of phenomenological reduction builds on a kind of
spiritual practice. We are required to cultivate a kind of spiritual attitude that
does not start with pre-judgments, but is open for unknown possibilities.
The Christian apophatic tradition built on a spiritual practice as well (as almost
every philosophical tradition in antiquity did): It started, strictly speaking, not
with dogmatic propositions but with doxological practices, namely the Jewish
cult of the temple, which culminated in the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’.
Now it is important to notice that doxological practices are not reducible to a
decorative prop that adds to our understanding of the ‘being’ of our everyday
world.
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Our understanding of ‘being’ goes always along with acts of appreciation and
praise with regard to realities that go beyond our comprehension – in the same
way as true a piece of art, like a painting of Paul Klee, goes beyond our
comprehension.
Hence, if we are open for unknown possibilities, we will discover that they
always participate in a reality that is already there; and this reality has a
doxological feature: It makes us wonder and praise.
To put it somewhat differently: When we try to anticipate a possibility, we do
not start at point zero, where just everything is possible in a random way. We
always start … not with a virtual, but with an actual reality. And this actual reality
is never neutral.
To quote Gerard Manley Hopkins “the world is charged with the grandeur
of God/ it shines out shining like shook foil”. 2
Following Thomas Aquinas, we might account for this charged, ontological
starting point in more prosaic terms.
According to Aquinas, every knowledge starts with the commitment to ‘being’,
or more precisely, to what Aquinas calls ens. The word ens does not only mean
‘being’. It does not designate just neutral facts, in the modern sense of this word.
As Chesterton has pointed out, the meaning of this word coincides in Aquinas
with what the English language calls ‘end’.
Every flower in the forest, every person on the street has the power to reveal by
and through itself that being is not only a possibility; it carries within itself a
meaningful end. This is the reason why, if we are open to the unknown
possibilities, everything can make us wonder and praise.
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I will stop at this point with my philosophical introduction to the radical
hermeneutics of post-modernity in order to provide you with a short answer to
the starting question of my lecture: What difference does today introduce with
regard to yesterday?
1) Our post-modern time requires us to focus on the apophatic (and
iconoclastic) features of the Christian tradition.
2) It requires us to consider doxological practices as fundamental.
This short answer to my starting question explains why my hermeneutics of
classical theological and philosophical texts, such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,
or Nicholas of Cusa, might occasionally appear ‘awry’ from a strictly philological
point of view.
In hermeneutical terms, I will always try to enhance the apophatic and
doxological features of premodern texts. And I think this is seriously possible if
we develop a contextualized, genealogical hermeneutic that pays attention to
the implicit background assumptions of premodern texts.
I am aware that this doxological hermeneutics of classical texts might
occasionally exaggerate their apophatic and doxological features. However, as a
philosophical theologian I am required to exaggerate – otherwise I would not be
able to cope with the challenges of our present time.
[The Science of Praise]
In the last part of my lecture, I will provide you with a very short outline of
how this doxological approach affects our understanding of the philosophical
concept of truth
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I will start with the (from my late-modern point of view) most important
background assumption of premodern tradition of Christian theology: The
theological conviction that our ability to speak about God arises from our
participation in a ‘Cosmic liturgy’,3 as Hans Urs von Balthasar expressed it
subsequent to Maximus Confessor (580-662).
This liturgical fundament includes a reflexive attitude that is comparable with
the sceptical basic attitude of modern philosophy: The liturgical “reaching out
toward God” is accompanied by a contemplative movement that articulates
itself in acts of affirmation and negation with regard to the inconceivable
fullness of the divine being.
However, the dialectic of affirmation and negation is not celebrated for its own
sake. It rather culminates in what is simultaneously the source and the summit
of all created activities, the praise of the ineffable God ‘where (as Cusa puts it)
to be silent is to speak’.4
Already Thomas Aquinas called this doxological mode of speaking the
highest form of science (the science of God and the blessed).5
Cusa built on this model when he stated that ‘the most wise science consists in
the praise of God who fashioned all things from out of His praises and for the
sake of His praise.6
In order to assess the significance of this quotation, it is important to realise
that, as Cusa points out, we do not praise something because we judge it good.
Rather, if our praise is genuine, and not just the expression of a herd instinct,
we judge something to be good because it makes us wonder and praise without
requiring that we give any thought about what we are doing.7
This phenomenon might be illustrated by our modern use of the word ‘wow’.
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We say ‘wow’ in occasion of an awe inspiring view or beautiful person
without giving any thought about what we are doing. Only afterwards we
think about how we might account for what we have just expressed.
Moreover, if something is truly awe-inspiring, every attempt to explain our initial
response will ultimately fail. Hence, it might be argued that the secular
interjection ‘wow’ is a remnant of liturgical practices of prayer and praise.
Even secular people are familiar with Cusa’s science of praise. To use a more
philosophical expression, liturgical practices articulate a pre-reflexive mode of
knowledge, and precisely this makes them appear . as a genuine kind of
knowledge that cannot be replaced by reflexive or scientific modes of
knowledge.
Apophatic theology builds on this pre-reflexive mode of knowledge when it
distinguishes between the affirmative language of prayer and praise, and the
language of reflexive negations or denials.
God is not praiseworthy because we judge him good; we judge him good
because he moves us to acts of prayer and praise already before we can think
about why this happens to be the case. And every attempt to explain what we
are doing afterwards, based on propositional judgements, is ultimately bound
to fail.
This explains why the language of true or false propositions is ultimately not
applicable to God.
However, this does not prevent the language of praise from being . a
fundamental condition of our ability to approximate the truth.
We might distinguish > at this point between truth1 and truth2, following
Heidegger and Derrida.8
27
The language of prayer and praise is to be located on the more fundamental
level of truth1.
Truth1 guides our attention, and enables us to decide about what is
significant, essential and praiseworthy – as distinct from what is marginal
or ephemeral.
Truth2, by contrast, is equivalent to ordinary truth-functional sentences.
The difference between these two levels of truth might be illustrated by a child,
asking her mother:
“Why is there a candle burning in the chapel?”
In truth-functional terms the following two responses are of equal value:
“It burns because a funeral service has been celebrated in the chapel”
- and
“It burns because there is oxygen in the chapel”.
In terms of truth1, the second response is under normal circumstances just
nonsense.
To put it more philosophically: Tuth1 corresponds to symbolic expressions that
delineate the horizon within which a response to a question might appear as
meaningful.
Truth2, by contrast, corresponds to truth-functional sentences, or more
precisely, to propositions, which refer to finite objects of knowledge by affirming
or denying “predicates” of a grammatical subject.
According to Heidegger, the more fundamental truth of truth1 corresponds to
the disclosing function of art.
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We might recall at this point Paul Klee’s infamous ‘Creative Crede’ of 1920: ‘art
does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible’.9 Art does not say what
is true or false; art enables us to see what is significant; it enables us to see what
deserves our appreciation and praise.
Cusa’s ‘science of praise’ builds on this observation. Liturgical or doxological
symbols do not reproduce historical or transcendent realities (truth2).
Rather, they make realities visible (truth1), or more precisely, they open our eyes
for the world we inhabit and make it intérpretable.
Without stating what is “true or false”, liturgy discloses what deserves our
attention and esteem, and helps us to distinguish between essential and
ephemeral occurrences and phenomena.
I will stop at this point with my short introduction to the philosophical
significance of Cusa’s science of praise by recalling again the significance of this
approach for the philosophical debates of our time.
Classical modern science was based on the assumption that it is at least in
principle possible to provide a neutral account of our world, and that we can
avoid to be selective based on biased decisions that are guided by preferences.
Today we are more than ever before aware that we cannot avoid being selective
and guided by preferences, and that this has always an impact on what we
consider to be significant.
Take the example of the third party funding of medical research by the pharma
and food industry:
The outcome of this research is always true in the sense of truth2. But it
would be possible to direct this research in a completely different
direction, if the pharma industry would be intrested to do so – for
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example by funding research on the impact of carbohydrates on obesity,
instead of focusing on fat.
However, this would be less profitable in economic terms. Hence, our
research is governed by a capitalist practices of appraisal that might lead
our food policy in severely distorted directions.
To put it in more simple everyday terms:
The age of Google and Facebook has redirected our attention to the doxological
features of your understanding of the world. The abundance of information has
made as aware of the fact that both, pre-scientific and scientific knowledge is
always selective.
However wants to know the truth has to decide on a case by case basis
which sentences and propositions (in the sense of truth2) he or she
considers to be worth recalling: Truth is, what deserves our public
appreciation
In the post-modern Facebook jargon we call this Like. If you click Like on
facebook you are actually pushing a doxology bottom. And the first question,
iconoclastic or apophatic theologians would ask in this case is: Are you doing
that in praise of your creator or out of an idolatrous attachment to fashions and
trends?
Against this background, I might be argued that the difference between religion
and secularism coincides with the difference between two forms of life: A form
of life that cultivates our use of doxological practices rationally, and forms of life
that that trust in the capitalist fetish cult of commodities.
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1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, in Charles Taylor and Amy Guttman (eds.),
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1994),
pp. 25-74, quotations from pp. 72-73.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”, In Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
selected by W.H. Gardner (London: Penguin, 1953, reprinted 1985), p. 27.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy. The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor.
Translated by Brian E. Daley (San Francisco Calif.: Ignatius Press 2003). For a reading of Cusa
in the light of this tradition, cf. Hudson, Becoming God, 26-35.
De dato patris lumini c. 3 n. 107,9.
Cf. S. Thomae Aquinatis "In librum beati Dionysii de divinis nominibus expositio" (Taurini:
Marietti 1995), Caput I Lectio III; and Corpus Dionysiacum I: De divinis nominibus, 1.5 (593 BC); cf. also David B. Burrell and Isabelle Moulin, "Albert, Aquinas and Dionysius". In: Sarah
Coakley; Charles M. Stang (Ed.), Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell 2009), 103-119, 107f., 111f. As for the impact of Dionysius on Aquinas, cf. Fran
O'Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Leiden: Brill 1992).
De venatione sapientiae, c. 18 n. 53,8-3 (own translation); cf. ibid. c. 18-20; c. 25; and Epistula
ad Nicolaum Bononiensem, n. 10. At p. 115 of his recent essay on the relevant chapters of De
venatione sapientiae, Gerhard Senger vehemently rejects my translation of scientia laudis as
‘Wissenschaft des Lobes’ though he appreciates eight pages earlier Harald Schwaetzers and
Kirstin Zeyer’s suggestion “in einer christologisch begründeten ‘Wissenschaft des Lobes’ den
Zielpunkt einer scientia amoris und scientia mortis in der ‘Nachfolge Christi’ [zu] sehen.“ (p.
107) (Cf. Hans G. Senger, "Das Feld 'laus' und die Laudibilien". In: Walter A. Euler (Ed.), Nikolaus
von Kues. De venatione sapientiae (Trier: Paulinus 2010); and Nikolaus von Kues, 'Ein
lebendiges Loblied Gottes'. Cusanus' Gedenkbüchlein für Nikolaus von Bologna. Textauswahl
in deutscher Übersetzung 7. Eingeleitet und übersetzt von Harald Schwaetzer und Kirstin
Zeyer (Trier: Paulinus 2006), 5-17 (Einleitung) and p.21 n.10). It is hard to see what Senger’s
problem is, given that I have written nothing different from Schwaetzer and Zeyer with respect
to the above letter to Nikolaus of Bologna (Nicolaum Bononiensem) and the related chapters
of De venatione sapientia in my 2007 monograph. Considering Senger’s own publications on
Cusa, I would have been less surprised had he expressed his discomfort with the fact that I
used Cusa’s scientia laudis as a hermeneutic key to Cusa’s thinking as a whole.
See De venatione sapientiae, c. 20 and c. 35.
Cf. Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp 1989), 7-24; Ernst Tugendhat, "Heideggers Idee von Wahrheit". In: Gunnar Skirbekk
(Ed.), Wahrheitstheorien (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1977), 431-448. See also with regard to the
tradition of apophatic theology (including Nicholas of Cusa): Jean-Luc Marion, "In the Name.
How to Avoid Speaking of 'Negative Theology' / Response By Jacques Derrida". In: John D.
Caputo; Michael J. Scanlon (Ed.), God, the gift, and postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press 1999), 20-53.
‚Kunst gibt nicht das sichtbare wider, sondern macht sichtbar.‘ Paul Klee, Kunst-Lehre (Leipzig:
Reclam 1991), 60 (own translation).
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